Pine Manor College, a small private college on a wooded campus in the Chestnut Hill section of Brookline, Massachusetts, founded in 1911, ceased to exist as an independent institution in 2020, when it was acquired by its far larger neighbor, Boston College. By the time the pandemic forced the decision, Pine Manor had remade itself into something unusual and valuable: a minority-serving institution where most students were the first in their families to attend college and many were low-income. Boston College took the campus, the assets, and the liabilities, taught out the remaining students, and built the Pine Manor name into a new Pine Manor Institute for Student Success. The college was absorbed — its mission preserved as a program inside a Jesuit research university, its independent existence ended.
Pine Manor’s history is a study in reinvention. It began in 1911 as a post-secondary division of the Dana Hall School, a finishing-school-era institution where the all-female student body once posed for class photographs in long white dresses. It became an independent junior college, then a four-year women’s college, then — under a deliberate change of mission in the 1990s — pivoted from educating the daughters of the social elite to educating women of color from underserved communities. It went fully coeducational in 2014. By the end it served a few hundred students, a majority first-generation and low-income, on a 45-plus-acre estate five miles from downtown Boston.
The reinvention was admirable and the finances were perilous. Pine Manor had a tiny endowment — about $8.7 million, much of it restricted — and depended heavily on auxiliary revenue: a daycare, summer English-language programs, weddings and corporate events. Roughly half its operating revenue came from those activities. When COVID-19 shut down campus life in the spring of 2020, that revenue evaporated overnight, and a college that had warned its own students about its uncertain future could no longer guarantee a fall opening. On May 13, 2020, Boston College announced it would take over.
Pine Manor represents the acquisition as both rescue and dissolution. Boston College, with a $2.4 billion endowment, absorbed Pine Manor’s roughly $11 million in liabilities, kept current students on the Chestnut Hill campus for up to two years to finish their degrees, and endowed the Pine Manor Institute for Student Success with $50 million to extend Pine Manor’s first-generation, low-income mission inside BC. The college that had reinvented itself to serve the students higher education most often overlooks ended by handing that mission, and its name, to a university with the resources to sustain it.
Cabrini University, a small Catholic institution in Radnor, Pennsylvania, founded in 1957 by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, conferred its final degrees in May 2024 and ceased operations at the end of that academic year. It did not collapse mid-semester or lock its gates without warning. Instead, in June 2023 — nearly a full year out — it announced that it would close after the 2023–24 year and that its 112-acre campus would pass to its far larger neighbor, Villanova University, two miles up the road. Villanova formally assumed ownership on June 28, 2024. The result is the gentlest verdict in this archive’s vocabulary and one of its saddest: a 67-year-old university, named for the first American saint, dissolved into the property of another.
The arithmetic was unambiguous well before the announcement. Cabrini had run operating deficits for nine consecutive years, from 2013 through 2022; the gap had widened to more than $10 million on a budget of roughly $45 million, and the university carried close to $49 million in debt by mid-2022, prompting a Standard & Poor’s downgrade that autumn. Enrollment, which had peaked around 2,360 students in 2016–17, had slid roughly a third by the time the board acted — a familiar fate for a tuition-dependent college with little endowment cushion, selling a four-year residential education in a saturated Philadelphia-area market against wealthier competitors, in the long demographic shadow of the pandemic.
The deal was less a rescue than a dignified wind-down with a buyer attached. Villanova agreed to retire roughly $45 million of Cabrini’s debt and to spend an estimated $25 million more on improvements, taking the campus for its own expansion. Cabrini’s students were not the asset; the real estate was. The university arranged transfer partnerships with Holy Family, Gwynedd Mercy, and Eastern Universities so that students could finish their degrees elsewhere, and Villanova pledged to consider Cabrini employees for its own openings — soft cushions, but not continuity.
What Cabrini represents is the acquisition as exit: an institution that saw the end coming, negotiated from what little strength it had left, and protected its students and its mission’s memory at the price of its own existence. The campus survives, rechristened the Villanova University Cabrini Campus; the Missionary Sisters extracted a promise to honor Mother Cabrini’s legacy; the final Mass was said by Villanova’s president, not Cabrini’s. The buildings are full of plans. The university that built them over 67 years is gone.
Concordia College, a small Lutheran institution in Bronxville, New York, founded in 1881 and run by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, announced on January 28, 2021 that it would cease operations that summer, and its Bronxville campus passed to its Catholic neighbor, Iona College, three miles away in New Rochelle. This is the Bronxville Concordia, distinct from the network of LCMS Concordias scattered across the country — not Concordia Portland, the largest of them, which had collapsed a year earlier, nor Concordia Selma, the historically Black Lutheran college in Alabama that had closed in 2018. It was, in fact, the fourth Concordia to close or merge in eight years, and the manner of its ending — an acquisition by a Roman Catholic institution that absorbed the campus and taught out the students — gives it its own clinical interest.
The mechanism was the now-familiar one, accelerated by the pandemic. Concordia was a tuition-dependent college with a long history of thin finances; its accreditor had flagged its position as precarious as far back as 1987, and rising tuition discounts and operating costs had ground at it for years. Enrollment, which stood near 1,300 in 2019–20, was nearly halved by COVID-19 — falling to roughly 580 by spring 2021 — and a college that small, that dependent on tuition, and that short on reserves could not survive the collapse. The board concluded that closure was the only honest course.
What it arranged was an acquisition rather than a stranding. In an agreement reached on May 11, 2021, Iona College — a larger Catholic institution nearby — took the Bronxville campus and committed to a teach-out so that Concordia’s students could complete their degrees. Concordia ceased academic instruction before the fall 2021 semester; that October it petitioned a Westchester court to formalize the $30 million sale of its main campus to Iona. Iona itself became Iona University on July 1, 2022, and went on to build the NewYork-Presbyterian Iona School of Nursing and Health Sciences on the former Concordia grounds.
What Concordia Bronxville represents is the acquisition as a managed end for a college that had run out of room: a 140-year-old Lutheran institution, absorbed campus and student body into a Catholic university that needed space to grow. The buildings remain in use; the cross on them is now a different denomination’s. The college that taught generations of Lutherans on that hill is gone in everything but the deed history.